That open letter was signed by a number of scholars and authors, including members of the Bertrand Russell Society such as Daniel Ellsberg and Noam Chomsky, according to a press release from the Society.

Professor Madigan also sent the leaders each a copy of Bertrand Russell’s History of the World in Epitome, a short book “which in only a couple of spare drawings and 21 words summarizes human folly throughout history and its ultimate doom in the event of a nuclear holocaust.”

From the press release:

Russell published the little book on his 90th birthday in 1962, only a few months before the Cuban Missile Crisis, a time when the world stood at the precipice of nuclear catastrophe, and, as we now know, a horror that was only barely averted. Russell, a renowned mathematician, philosopher, and Nobel Prize laureate, worked tirelessly to reduce the nuclear threat during the Cold War until his death in 1970 at age of 98. Russell and the great physicist, Albert Einstein, issued their famous Russell–Einstein Manifesto in 1955 to highlight the dangers posed by nuclear weapons, calling for world leaders to seek peaceful resolutions to international conflict.

There is one comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Please wait while you are being authenticated...

Comment

Name *

Email *

Website

Participate in this conversation via email

Please enter an e-mail address

Participate in this conversation via emailGet only replies to your comment, the best of the rest, as well as a daily recap of all comments on this post. No more than a few emails daily, which you can reply to/unsubscribe from directly from your inbox.